As of Friday morning there were 109 RC bugs remaining that affected
both testing and unstable. So we held a bug-squashing party today at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the office of the
student computing group SIPB.
The BSP was publicized to computer-science students at MIT. About 30
people attended, many of whom had no previous experience contributing
to Debian or other free-software projects.
Four Debian Developers, Sam Hartman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Karl Ramm,
and Christine Spang, were on hand to upload fixes and help everyone
find appropriate bugs and understand Debian norms in responding.
Everyone got their hands dirty on a bug and (except the DDs, I guess)
learned something about bug-fixing and about Debian and working within
a free-software project. 15 people contributed to resolutions or
partial resolutions of 11 RC bugs:
* Waseem Daher closed #436140 as unreproducible
* Tim Abbott fixed #476525, NMU'd by Sam Hartman
* Evan Broder fixed #507071, NMU'd by Karl Ramm
* Sam Hartman downgraded #507072
* Nelson Elhage downgraded #504626 with Sam Hartman's advice
* Quentin Smith reassigned #502845 to the correct package,
and a maintainer downgraded it
* Benjamin Mako Hill tweaked and sponsored a fix for #489501
* Anders Kaseorg identified the upstream fix for #508265
* Eric Price diagnosed #506057 and suggested a fix
* Xavid Pretzer, Sam Freilich, Peter Iannucci, and Jameson Nash
studied #506478, identified the complex upstream change that
incidentally fixed the bug, and proposed a simple fix for Debian
* Greg Price cloned #505440 into #508686 and added a patch,
which fixes the problem behavior in #426465
That leaves 105 RC bugs now remaining that affect both testing and
unstable, with all of today's decrease due to our changes. Some of
our fixes may further decrease the count if maintainers upload our
patches.
We're pleased with the results of this bug-squashing party, both in
moving lenny a few small steps toward release and in inducting more
young people into contributing to Debian and free software. Other
local groups should consider doing similar events.
Cheers,
Greg Price
MIT SIPB
PS - For anyone thinking about a similar event, here's a bit of
Python code we found useful for producing a list of relevant bugs:
http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs-htmlhttp://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/rcbugs.py
Sample output is here:
http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs.html